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Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner cannot claim to be the only world leader to lash out against oil speculators this week. Last Tuesday President Obama used an appearance in the White House Rose Garden to do the same. But Kirchner put her money where her mouth is. She announced she was renationalizing YPF, Argentina's national oil company, which was privatized in 1993 and still accounts for almost all of the country's oil production. 

Señora Kirchner was in the widow's weeds she has worn since her husband, president until 2007, died of a heart attack two years ago. Like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Néstor Kirchner mixed postmodern global activism and backward-looking Cold War ideology. His country was ripe for...